The current maps are favored by certain builds. Add some more open style maps like the halloween ones. By having some open maps and some tight quarter maps, you allow plays to play more diverse viable builds. A lot of people complain about elves. My elves were fun to play on maps that were more free to run around in. An all elf team sucks ass 90% of the time on the current ones. I am not saying get rid of them, but maybe add 3 more to the rotation. Otherwise I'll just go build a 2 warrior 1 cleric team like everyone else. *Yes I know some people are doing fine with other styles.*
The problem is having maps where certain builds or races have a clear advantage. The solution is not to include more of these broken maps in the rotation, so that it's less about players vs. player and more about which map you happen to get. The solution is to make maps that are different but unbiased. Maps could be all shapes and sizes but should also be balanced so that each map had both room to move and cover for melee characters. Previously we had a terrible map called Celestial Koi which was incredibly biased towards wizards. Now we have a set of maps that are all biased towards warriors, especially the stepping kind. I really hope that the significance of maps would be decreased, so that maps would only spice things up a bit, not force people to change their decks. I think the devs should test all new maps by having a team of warriors fight a team of wizards a bunch of times. If one team wins considerably more than the other, then that map needs to be changed to make it more balanced.
I would guess that it's pretty hard to make a map that has absolutely no class bias. But it also seems to me that at least one of the halloween rotation maps was pretty well-balanced in terms of bias toward classes (all maps are biased toward dwarves because the game is biased toward dwarves; discussion on this can be found elsewhere), at least compared to celestial koi, dojo, or the gladius maps.
I like it that certain map set in rotation makes people change their teams! I think it adds depth to allow people use their deck building skills to match the maps and builds commonly played on those maps... as long as it is not totally biased. And I don't think it is now. At least I used to run two warriors in Halloween maps but don't do it with these maps. If anything, two warrior 1 cleric setup has gained popularity because mass frenzy is all those clerics are good for now
I dunno, utility priests might be good if control wizards become too dominant—purge, cleansing ray, and nimbus are all sweet cards depending on the meta.
Yes, it's definitely not easy. It's something that is pretty much impossible to without testing. But like I suggested before, having a warrior team and a wizard team fight each other 100 times would give a pretty good idea on how biased the map is. For example had they done it with Celestial Koi, the score would have been Wizards 90 - Warriors 10, and it would have been easy to fix the map, or at least make it less biased. My theory is that the reason the current maps are so warrior-friendly is because they are a kind of temporary solution to control wizards being overpowering. I think that BM underestimated the power of stacking traits to wizards, and they are now trying to figure out how to balance it. This is a very common argument for biased maps. I don't agree with it though. I don't think that biased maps add any depth to the game. I think they do the opposite and make the game more shallow. When I first started MP, it was much more fun because lower ratings meant you fought all kinds of crazy people with crazy builds. My opponents were new to the game and still learning, just like me, so they tried out all kinds of builds. That was fun. But once you step up in the ratings and get closer to top 20, you start seeing less and less unique builds and more and more the same builds and same cards. In the top 10 it's very rare that you see something totally unique. Most people use very similar tactics, for example if you see a dwarven warrior, you can pretty much guess the whole deck he has. Although this has more to do with some cards being better than others, biased maps make the situation worse because players have to adapt teams decks to certain maps. And when everyone does that, we will see less variation. In my opinion only way to make the metagame more deep and varied is to balance the cards and use unbiased maps. This way you still get some breath of fresh air when the new maps arrive but everyone can play whatever they want without being at a huge disadvantage.
